Our regional competition in Lubbock, Texas took our team farther than we’ve gone before. We pushed through until the third round of the finals and came home as finalists. More extensive details and information about all of our matches and other things will be coming soon in the next few days.

1 week left in build season and things are progressing smoothly. Let’s take a look-see at what’s been going on.

We’ve finally figured out all the problems that our test chasis has been causing us. And we now have a functioning prototype chasis for the robot. This lets our programmers and drivers learn the ins and outs of Mecanum drive while the manipulator is fabricated separately.

Speaking of manipulator fabrication, things are going well on that front. Most of the parts are machined and things just need to be bolted and put together.

With any luck, we won’t have to be cramming a whole lot of work into the last few hours of build season like we did our last two years. With any luck, we should have a functioning robot in just a few days.

The third week is already done and our team is really getting stuff done. Let’s take a look at all the miscellaneous pieces and prototypes we’ve assembled so far.

This guy is our prototype chasis. His job is to let our programmers and drivers practice with and work all the kinks out of mecanum wheels. It’s not entirely ready, however, as the motor controllers are having some issues and giving our programmers a headache.

The programmers contemplate the problems with the motor controllers.

Testing the chasis

These are the arms that, when on the robot, will have grippers attached to them to hold the ball. They’ll be able to swing around the robot for aiming, and have a puncher mounted in between them for shooting.

This is a small experiment to practice using vision targeting. We will want this on the robot so it can tell in autonomous which goal is hot and which one isn’t.

This is a nifty little tray that will mount underneath the robot to hold the battery. It can slide in and out to quickly change the battery.

Tonight, our team put our two competing shooter prototypes to the test. We dragged them outside, set up some lighting, got our high-speed camera out, and started launching!

The first design we tested was the wooden “puncher.” This held the ball in two arms while a piston extended to punch the ball.

It’s like a giant pinball machine!

This prototype performed pretty well. According to the footage from the high-speed camera, the ball was launched at about 8 meters per second.

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The second design is the rather scary looking “lever.” This metal contraption kicked the ball with a spring loaded lever.

Sure, it looks mean. But how does it launch?

The lever launched the ball at a good 10 m/s. Despite the faster speed, our team still decided to go with the puncher design on the robot because it was simpler and more compact. It also allowed for better mobility on our robot.